March 12, 2005

No word for sex

Novelist Frank Delaney was on NPR's Weekend Edition today, babbling
to Scott Simon about the Irish and how different their world view is from
everyone else. We Irish, he explained, have no word for yes in our
language, and no word for no. And, he added, "no word for sex! But we're
not going to get into that." Not him, maybe, but Language Log is not
afraid to get into sex. I immediately suspected that Delaney was gilding
the lily, and that this notion — a language with no word for the
absolute best way to have fun that does not involve laughing — would
turn out to be utter nonsense. I therefore turned, as I have before, to
one of the foremost modern Irish specialists in the world, my colleague
at UC Santa Cruz, Jim McCloskey. Could it be true, really, I asked him,
that Irish has no word for sex?

He sighed the deep sigh of a man who often has to listen to people
talking ignorant nonsense about a dying language that he loves and has
studied for forty years. And he remarked that FrankDelaney couldn't have
spent much time around people who actually speak the language. And he then listed the first few Irish terms
for various kinds of sex and sexual activities that came to his mind:

(I dare not tell you what these mean, because of
FCC regulations. I've put them in alphabetical
order. Some dictionaries fail to list some of them, but all are in use
in the native-speaker community.
Two of the terms refer to masturbation, but hey, as Woody Allen said,
that's sex with someone you love. Notice that three of the terms are single words.)

So what on earth can Frank Delaney be thinking of?
Why do people say these things about languages they purport to care about,
and do absolutely nothing to check up on whether the things they are
saying are even remotely close to the truth? Why is everyone so given to
bullshitting about language and thought, even about the language of
their own countrymen?

The story about Irish lacking particles meaning "yes" and "no"
is true, by the way. But it has nothing to do
with the Irish mind or spirit or way of looking at the world or the notion
of neither agreeing nor disagreeing. In Irish
you repeat the verb of someone's clause to agree with it (as if someone said
"Got milk?" and the way you gave an affirmative response was to say "Got"),
and you repeat their verb with the negation particle in front to deny it
("Not got"). But the same is
true of Chinese. Anyone want to suggest that the Chinese have exactly
the same cultural propensities and outlook on life as the Irish? More
bullshit about language and thought.

Here's some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say
something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or
"The X have N different words for Y", never
listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's
still there.